


The Little Match Girl

by acareeroutofrobbingbanks



Series: The High Way to Hell [14]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Christmas, the high way to hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:47:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21991678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acareeroutofrobbingbanks/pseuds/acareeroutofrobbingbanks
Summary: Stuck in a blizzard, a woman tells Fall Out Boy a Christmas-themed ghost story.
Series: The High Way to Hell [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/61829
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	The Little Match Girl

Andy wasn’t entirely sure when the woman sat down in front of them, but he was certain that he liked her. She had a motherly look about her, from the silver strands that seemed to make her black hair glitter to the plump arms loosely wrapped around her thick stomach. She had warm brown eyes, just lit up by the fire’s glow.

“While we’re all stuck here,” she said, her soft, sunny voice a soothing noise in the chilly quiet of the dark room. “Would you like to hear a story?”

“Storytime!” Carmilla said. Shrieked might have been a more apt word, piercing as it was in the otherwise quiet room. The woman gave her one indulgent smile, a flash of milk white teeth, and she nodded. She sat beside the hearth so that the roaring fire lit her from behind, and began.

“Once, many Christmases ago, there was a little girl. Only this was a very sad, very cold little girl. And she wasn’t inside by a nice warm fire, like we are. She spent her Christmas out in the dark and the cold, the snow so cold against her face it seemed to burn. She stood out in the blizzard with her book of matches, for her horrible father had told her to sell them.”

Carmilla clutched her blanket and made big, huge eyes at the woman.

One little thing that Andy loved - like, _loved_ \- about having a kid, was that they always experienced life to the fullest. Carmilla hadn’t heard most ghost stories before, so when she was told a story by a fire, she heard it like new.

So, even if Andy wasn’t going to be that entranced by a stranger telling him the story of the little match girl, he could enjoy his daughter’s brand new appreciation of it. 

Fall Out Boy (and little Carmilla) were stuck at their hotel, stranded by a snowstorm, unable to get back home. Which wouldn’t have been so annoying if it hadn’t been _Christmas_. 

Pete shifted back in his seat, looking entirely forlorn. Well, Andy thought. It might have been just as bad for Pete and Patrick, whose baby was staying with grandma. But still, though he wouldn’t say it to their faces, it was probably better that they weren’t stranded with no formula in the middle of a blizzard.

So, with the snow almost sheeting down outside, the flurries were so thick and heavy, they had been holed up in their rooms. And then the power went out, and now everyone was holed up in the admittedly ritzy lobby. Merry Christmas.

But Andy kept reminding himself that it could’ve been worse. They could be stranded outside, or underwater, or in a cabin surrounded by angry trees. Instead, they were on plush couches, and the usually decorative fire were roaring merrily. And he had Carm with him. 

“This little girl wanted to be inside in the warm, like we are,” the woman said. “But alas, it was not her fate. She was fated to meet something darker. To meet… ghosts.”

Carmilla gave a theatrically little gasp.

“‘s this a ghost story?” she asked, her eyes big.

“Yes, sweetheart,” the woman said. “A bit of a ghost story, but also a bit of a fairy tale. It was written, the first time, by the man who wrote the Little Mermaid.”

“Like lil mermaid,” Carmilla said. “Like Flounder. But it’s Christmas, and ghost stories are for Halloween?”

“No, little one,” the woman said. “For hundreds of years, Christmas used to be a time for ghost stories. But you needn’t fear. The ghosts in this story are all good and kind.”

“Like good vampires,” Carmilla said. Andy shot her a sharp look, but the woman just laughed.

“Just like good vampires, dear one, yes. Shall I go on?”

Carmilla nodded, still paying her rapt attention. 

“Right, so, where was I?” the woman asked. “We had just begun, yes? So, the poor little match girl stood on the streets with her book of matches, shaking and shivering in the snow, trying to sell matches to the people walking back home that cold, cold Christmas night. But no one wanted to buy matches, and no one stopped to help the poor thing.

“She got so cold and so hopeless that she wanted to go home, but she knew her father would hurt her if she came home with no money, for her father was not a nice man.”

Carmilla made a noise of distress, and Andy saw Pete looking vaguely interested, out of the corner of his eyes. Something about kids hearing stories made very story a little better, Andy thought fondly.

“But she was so cold, she couldn’t stand another minute, and it was very dark outside too. So, the little girl decided to light just one match.”

The woman produced a book of matches then, holding one up before Carmilla before striking it on the box. Andy was hit with the sulphurous smell of the match catching, then there was another glittering point of light in the room, illuminating the woman’s shrouded face from the bottom. It cast stark, angular shadows across her face, for a moment making her somehow longer and edgier than she could possibly have been. Andy shivered, suddenly struck by the spooky mood she was setting.

“She held the light up to her face, and do you know what she saw?”

“Fire?” Carmilla ask, though in her still babyish voice, the “r” sound got lost.

“Yes, but inside the fire, she saw a vision. In the fire, she saw an amazing Christmas feast all spread out across a table. There were all her favorites, like a whole roast goose, cranberry dressing, fluffy, buttery mashed potatoes, roast greens, ice cream with O-negative syrup, and chocolate cake.”

“Sorry,” said Patrick suddenly. Andy was annoyed at him for breaking the spell, and he turned to glare at Patrick, who, despite it being the middle of the night, did not look sleepy at all. “What did you say?”

“Chocolate cake, her favorite dessert,” said the woman, and she winked at Patrick. Andy felt unease stir in him again, something about the story was just so _spooky_ the way she told it. 

“The table was heavy laden with all her favorite, most decadent foods. And sitting all around it were her favorite people,” the woman surveyed them. “Her father, her three silly uncles, her loving, doting grandmother, and her mother.”

“Three uncles?” Patrick asked.

“These things in stories always come in threes,” the woman said. “At the head of the table, her father, no longer a mean man but a good, kind father held hands with her mother, who was no longer dead! The little girl had always longed to know her mother, and she saw that they could there be a happy family at last.

“So, the little girl took a step forward, and then the match sputtered out, revealing the cold, dirty streets of Chicago in front of her.”

“Wasn’t Hans Christian Andersen from Denmark?” Andy asked vaguely.

The woman simply winked at him as well, as though telling him to go along with it, and Andy shrugged. He supposed setting it in Chicago made the whole thing spookier. Though, really, the spookiest thing would be to set it in the city they were in. But… what city were they in? His thoughts grew foggy and muddled when he tried to focus too hard.

“What happened next?” asked Carmilla.

“Well,” said the woman. “The little girl tried to keep selling her matches, but it was getting quite dark out, and fewer and fewer people were out on the streets. Eventually, she realized no one was coming, and she might as well light another match, perhaps this time getting a proper look at the dinner spread out before her, and her mother and father alive and loving. 

“She struck the second match.” 

With a scratch-hiss, another match was lit, flickering just before the woman’s face, throwing it into a relief of mountainous angles and deep shadows. 

“The little match girl looked into the flame again, and this time she saw not a heavily laden dinner table, but a big, beautiful Christmas tree. Now, her father didn’t even like Christmas, which meant he set up the whole tree just for her. It glittered with lights against a rainbow of ornaments, and beneath its boughs were nearly countless presents all wrapped up in paper, all addressed to the little girl. She had never gotten presents before, not in her whole life. So, she reached out to pull the bow off of one of then, when suddenly-”

Her face was thrown into darkness again as

“-the match guttered out.”

Carmilla was twisting in Andy’s arms as though trying to get closer, worked up by the story.

“And then and then and then?”

“By then the streets were utterly empty,” the woman said. “So the little match girl lit a third match-”

Light, again.

“-and in it-”

This time, the woman leaned in close, and Carmilla leaned in, staring into the light atop the match. Andy looked too, telling himself that he was just humoring his daughter, but then he saw something in the fire. A shape, slowly defining itself into a face, and the face was starting to look like-

Andy’s breath caught in his throat.

“-the little girl saw her mother.”

Andrea’s face was staring out of the flames, looking not at Andy, but directly at Carmilla.

“Her… mother?” Carmilla asked, sounding out each syllable with intense care. She sounded older, more mature, and Andy could hardly bear it.

“Her mother,” the woman agreed. “The only person who had ever loved her, her mother showed up in the flame and beckoned to the little match girl. Her mother, who had been killed by her own father.”

“Daddy?” Carmilla turned away from the match at the same time as Patrick shouted: “Something’s wrong!”

Andy was still staring at Andrea, but she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at him and if she did she would _hate_ him she would turn and try to kill him to and-

“It’s not real!” Patrick yelled. “You’re not real!”

Andy blinked.

For a moment, the fire was formless, empty but for a dark shadow roiling inside it. Then he blinked again, and Andrea was snarling.

Andy’s lips began to form the shape of her name, but he heard movement and looked up. The woman was on her feet above him, no longer a kindly, motherly figure, but stretched and distorted, the sockets where her eyes should be wide and empty and monstrously large in her face. He tried to hold onto the image but it burned his eyes like staring into the heart of a fire, and when he blinked, the horror was gone, and the woman remained.

“What’s your name?” Andy asked, cautious rather than the “What are you?” he had in mind. 

“Names aren’t important in fairy tales,” the woman told him. “Would you like to know what happens next?”

“Unh-unh!” Carmill said. “I’m scared.”

“But the story is almost over,” the woman said. “Once the match burnt out, she was desperate to see her mother again, so she took the matchbook, ripped out a handful of every single match, and lit all of them at once.”

“No!” Patrick shouted from somewhere behind Andy, and then in the woman’s hand there was a blaze of fire.

“ _Tell me_ ,” the woman said, her voice suddenly thin and raspy. “ _Do you know how this fairy tale ends?_ ”

The fire grew as tall as her, a pillar in the middle of the lobby. In the fire, Andrea stood, slightly larger than she was in real life. 

“ _Andy_ ,” she said. “ _Aaaaandy_.”

Andy stood up, Carmilla still cradled in one arm. He moved like he was swimming through molasses, knowing he had to be quick by still moving so achingly slowly. 

“No, I’m not,” Joe whispered next to him. 

Pete made a sort of whimpering noise. Patrick kept saying “no” over and over again, and they all seemed to be moving in slow motion. 

Andy felt like he was thinking through molasses too. There was a secret, there had to be something he’d be able to do before the fire creature version of Andrea grabbed Carmilla right out of his arms. Patrick had said something earlier, he’d said that it wasn’t real. _You’re not real_.

Andy pushed Carmilla behind him. He could move at a regular speed again and made sure she was well out of the creatures reach, and then he threw his hands forward into a fire that was, unfortunately, very real.

As soon as his arm was in the fire that made up Andrea he began to scream, and so did the apparition of Andrea.

“You’re not real!” Andy said, but it sounded very unsure while he was screaming in pain. He yanked his arms back and shook out the flames. The fiery Andrea was snarling, and Andy took up one of the heavy pokers next to the fireplace, still crackling merrily, and he swung it through the creature.

With another almighty shriek, the fire began to dissolve, melting back into the ground. With one final flare that made him smash his eyes shut, it was gone. When Andy was able to open his eyes and look again, there was nothing but a pile of burnt out matches on the ground. 

Andy blinked a few times, his eyes adjusting to the light. He noticed that he wasn’t in a hotel lobby, and there was no blizzard raging outside. It was sunny, warm, and also, notably, Pete and Patrick’s living room in the middle of the day. Andy looked down at his arms, still mottled with burns.

Huh.

Next to Andy, the rest of his band did not look like they were doing especially well. Which was to say that two of them were openly weeping and Pete was staring, whitefaced, into the middle distance. But all of them were blinking, shock creeping into their faces, like they were waking up from nightmares. Which Andy took to mean that whatever they had seen was also gone. 

Carmilla was gone too, out of the room, but Andy’s memories were coming back slowly. They were celebrating, trying to just have a nice, normal time, which, hey, so much for that. At least there was a lot of vegan chocolate laid out for him.

“Shit,” Patrick said, his voice just slightly shaky. He shook his head and blinked hard. “I, uh. Might I be the first to say, uh, ‘What the fuck’?”

“Yeah, what the shit?” Joe asked. 

“Shapeshifter,” Pete said. And his voice, that made Andy turn to check and see that Pete was okay, because it sounded shaky and hollow in a way that Andy had heard before Pete ended up panicking and doing something Bad. But he looked fine, if a little pale.

“Does it have a name?” Andy asked, and Pete shook his head.

“No, and yes. Every name, because it’s everything. Some creatures have proper names for it, but since it always changes -- no. It doesn’t have a name, nor does it have allegiances. We’re just lucky this was a small one, easy to dispel.”

“Lucky Andy was here, you mean,” Patrick said. “Well, Jesus, Merry Christmas, everyone, and just out of curiosity, when did we start seeing things different? We were all in the lobby, right? In the snowstorm? And she was telling us a story-”

“The little match girl,” Andy said. “Yeah, an old fairy tale.”

“How does it end?” Joe asked.

“She sees what she wants most in the world in the bundle of matches,” Pete said. “And then she dies.”

They were quiet for a moment, then Joe began to laugh.

“Damn, we can’t even do holidays together without fighting off the end of the world,” he said. “So, I’m gonna Fed-Ex your presents next year, if that’s cool.”

“Fine by me,” Andy said. “But I think we still have a few hours of Christmas cheer ahead of us.” Midmorning, he realized, meant Carmilla was still in the kitchen, eating cinnamon rolls, and soon she’d be back out and demanding another seven or eight renditions of Jingle Bells. And they were alive and well, and that was good enough in terms of holiday cheer for the moment.

“So,” Andy said, much later. “What did you see in the flames?”

None of the others responded, but then, Andy realized, it was a deeply personal question. And while it was far from the time to hide things from each other, given the black-eyed situation they were dealing with, well. Andy wasn’t religious, but it was Christmas. And the pain could maybe wait for a day.

**Author's Note:**

> short and not so sweet, but I wrote it, and there has been such a content drought y'all deserved something. Merry belated christmas and happy holidays and may all of us have a great rawring 20s


End file.
